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Is the Family Doomed?

If you had a trying time with your relatives this holiday season, the news is good. Such gatherings will soon be a faint memory according to sociologist Joel Cotkin in a new report “The Rise of Post-familism (1).”

What is post-familism?

Ever since the Stone Age, married couples and their children were the building block of all societies. In post-familism, most young people opt not to marry. Even if they marry, many opt not to have children. So families with children is no longer the most common type of household.

These simple changes transform societies based upon the family unit to networks of individuals who come together for companionship, for entertainment, and to cope with practical problems. The model is the urban bohemian communities that sprang up in cities a century ago with a rejection of conventional family life and an emphasis on personal growth and fulfillment.

Post-familism is of great concern to demographers who foresee some very bad consequences extending far into the future. Chief of these are exceptionally low birth rates and an unprecedented aging of the population. This is bad because it means that the population will have much more elderly people. There will be fewer people of peak working age.

So the entire world population begins to look more like Japan with its rapidly aging population, high dependency ratio, and stagnant economy. Cotkin’s report (1) is most interesting in its identification of possible causes.

Causes of post-familism

One key factor is prosperity. Family groups, and kin networks more generally are partly a reflection of the difficulty of making a living alone. In prosperous societies, healthy well-paid individuals can look out for themselves. This is particularly true in social democracies where basic health and survival needs are protected by government safety nets.

Prosperity also brings more job opportunities for women who enjoy greater job opportunities in modern service economies where physical strength is no longer an advantage. Contemporary women are out-competing men in third-level education and occupationally successful women often delay marriage and childbearing as hindering their careers.

Urbanization of the population is another key trend. The high population density in cities is adverse to child bearing for numerous reasons, including the high cost of living space, and risks to children from high crime rates. Even schools tend to be bad in large cities (1) and that is particularly true of public schools.

In effect, young people have a choice between remaining in the city with all the personal, and occupational advantages this brings, or moving to cheaper suburbs where they can afford to raise children.

Even the bad economic times the developed world is currently experiencing mean that marriage and child bearing are delayed due to hesitation about taking on the financial burden of a family.

Cotkin, of Chapman University, believes that the worldwide decline in religion is also a cause of the decline in conventional families on the assumption that religion bolsters family values . This is questionable. In my recent book “Why Atheism Will Replace Religion (2)” I argue that the decline in religion and the decline in fertility are both caused by economic development.

Is it really all about values?

Having outlined the many practical influences that work against families, Cotkin concludes, incongruously in my opinion, that the future of families is really a matter of what people want to do to protect families. This frustrating tendency to shift from credible scientific explanations to unsatisfactory ones that are circular, or moralistic, is unfortunately common and reflects theoretical weaknesses in sociology (3).

The brave new world of post-familism is a fascinating problem for social scientists, including evolutionary scholars like myself. Will we diverge forever into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World of unrelated individuals where families are disreputable? Or will we cling to marriage and the family that saved our hides up to this point? Either way, we are learning much about what it means to be human.

Cotkin failed to mention Americas high rate of immigration by working class/religious immigrants. This influx will help keep America from going over the tipping point I believe into full blown Post-familism. While white America may continue to decline an age of new immigrants will rise up to take its place. This is something Japan did not have. They have opened their doors slightly to immigration but really they still make assimilating into their culture difficult.

All of the 17 guests, ages 18 - 81, at my house on Christmas were single (either divorced, widowed, or never-married) and only two were relatives (an aunt and a cousin). While I remarked on this composition at the time, I hadn't considered calling ourselves post-familists. It has a nice ring to it, but carries a connotation of advocacy; so, while I'll mention the term at our next get-together, I suspect we'll pass on it. However, this sort of ad hoc holiday grouping does seem to be more common than it once was.

The same forces that gave birth to singleness are also causing extreme amounts of stress and status anxiety. Women hate men who have lower status then they do, hence their aversion to child rearing with anyone deemed 'unfit'.

Women hate men who have lower status? I thought women love 'bad boys'? Sounds like people can't make up their minds what half the population hates. Some women doubtless will spurn those with lower status or fewer resources. Some don't care and just want a baby, or just don't want to be alone.

I agree that with humans having evolved as social animals, the current trends are causing stress, but stress is what causes change, too, so we'll have to see where it leads.

I have noticed the trend toward friend groups versus family groups. Family are just people you were attached to by chance. Friends are people you choose. If you don't need them for your immediate survival, there is going to be a strong urge to associate with those you choose.

The first comment made a good point about immigration. I feel that many of Nigel's points are valid, but he tends to treat WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries as if they were a closed system. The majority of the future population in 'the west' may not be descendants of the population that lived there in 1950. That change has already happened in London. Many of the newcomers have extended family groups organised around kinship and they seem able to sustain them over the generations. The western nuclear family is doomed, but it's not the only type in the west now.

I seriously question the credibility of any scholar, let alone an "evolutionary" scholar who thinks marriage was normative in the stone age. Such sweeping and incorrect generalizations show just how far from actual science and reality such scholars let themselves wander, making their work totally irrelevant in the process.

No one can express the meaning of family and every human being need a family for survive, so we say that human beings are social animal. A family is a group of different age people, for this we enjoy every moment in our family. When we have a baby in a family, our happiness becomes double. It is ok but we have to take care of a baby especially it is the responsible of parents. For this they should have sufficient knowledge about this.